by T L Barrett
Three hundred dollars.
“We’ll see you again tomorrow morning, all right?” the man said. I nodded.
“I’ve made a copy of one of your stories to show your aunt,” he said and handed me the typed and stapled sheets. “Really marvelous. You should be proud. I know she’ll be.” Then he walked back out of the room.
I hadn’t saved, transferred or printed anything. I was back in my old beat up Corolla before I realized that I had not once mentioned my aunt to Mr. Smiley.
***
That night, I sat by my aunt’s hospital bed and told her about my first wonderful day as a writer.
“I brought you one of my stories,” I said. “You don’t have to read it until you feel up to it.”
“Hand me my glasses, Curtis,” she said with a tired grin. “I’m going to read it right now.”
So I sat there, looking sheepishly around the room while my aunt read the story.
I heard my aunt sniffle, and looked over. Tears coursed down my aunt’s gaunt cheeks.
“I’m sorry. It is an awful story,” I stammered. “I should never have shown it to you.”
“No,” she sniffed, and pressed the story to her thin chest protectively. She wiped at the tears with a shaking hand. “I think it is a… powerful story. It is very sad…”
“It’s disturbed,” I said. My aunt composed herself and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “It speaks the truth, you know, about how lonely the world is… how very lonely…”
“I shouldn’t have shown it to you,” I said and took the story from her. She gripped my arm with one strong but bony hand.
“Curtis, you’re an artist. I always knew you were. Don’t be ashamed. Finally, someone else is seeing it. You just need to see it. Promise me you’ll keep going, okay?” she said.
I didn’t know what to say, but I nodded.
“Give me a kiss, honey. Then, I think, I’ll get some sleep. I am so tired all of a sudden,” she said. I kissed her and said good night. I went home. Every once and awhile, as I drove home, I looked over at the strange story sitting on the passenger seat beside me.
Did I have that kind of darkness inside of me?
***
That next morning, early, the hospital called. My aunt had passed away suddenly in her hospital bed. They had done what they could, but her heart had just given up.
I killed her, I thought, with that damned story. I almost said it to the doctor on the phone in some insane confession. Instead, I thanked them and got dressed in a hurry. I went to her cooling body. It felt like something had drawn the warmth and vitality right out of her.
I called my aunt’s closest friends. They said they would come and help. While I waited, my cell phone rang. It was Mr. Smiley.
“We’ve missed you at the program,” he said.
“My aunt has died,” I said, surprised at the accusatory anger in my voice.
“I know,” he said. “My deepest condolences, Curtis. I think you should come in; a bit of writing will do you good.”
“My aunt has just died!” I said.
“We’ll be expecting you at one o-clock. You can have till then to make all the necessary arrangements, all right?” he said.
I looked up; my aunt’s friends had arrived in the doorway of the room which the hospital had reserved for the bereaved.
“All right?” he asked again. It did not sound like a question.
“All right,” I said, and hung up the phone.
My aunt’s friends helped me make all the arrangements. By noon, I was saying good-bye to them. As I drove into the driveway for our apartment building, I suddenly felt like I didn’t want to return to the empty and silent rooms I had shared with my aunt.
I drove to the foundry. I went inside. Mr. Smiley was nowhere to be seen. The computer waited for me. As my bottom hit the seat, that strange music flowed forth once more.
I wrote as tears flowed down my cheeks. I wrote as I laughed maniacally. I wrote and wrote and wrote.
***
For another two weeks, past my aunt’s funeral, like some dark blur, past calling the supermarket manager to say I had quit, (“We figured,” he said), I wrote. I ate like a machine needing fuel; I slept like a dead person in the silent apartment. I wrote.
“A bout of suicides, in unprecedented number, has happened across the nation,” the radio announced on my way to “work”, but I didn’t really notice. It had nothing to with me, of course.
Why would anyone kill themselves? Weren’t we all fashioned in the likenesses of a creator, supposedly? We were gods. Why kill yourself when you could write? I scoffed at the idea. Of course, not everyone was born with my natural talent, I fancied in my vanity. But, there were other ways to inspire, to create. I thought of the unseen musician that played every time I sat down in the foundry to pound out the dark thoughts bouncing around in my skull.
The thought stayed with me all through the day, even in the heavy zeal of writing. Each triumphant squeal and pounding of sound that accompanied the trials and denouements of my characters only piqued my interest. Who was this mad musician?
Then, finally, I realized I had been struggling against the music itself, and also against my own unconscious desire to write. Finally, slowly, with every effort, I pulled my fingers from the keyboard, but let them type on, in the air, pretending to flow along with music. I must have looked like someone with a serious nerve disorder as I followed the cords from the computer out the door and around the corner. I followed the music down the hall and around a bend. A rusted steel stair led down into a deep and open foundry floor room.
I slowly walked, making my fingers dance to the strange music pounding all around me. The air smelled of soot, sweat, and some strange scent, like that of burning fungus.
In the center of the great foundry floor sat the most uncommon machine I had ever seen. It looked like some strange steam-fed organ. Great shining brass pipes twisted in obscene patterns, overlapping and disappearing among each other like a nightmare of Escher’s. Steam whistled as the great bags like swollen tapestries screeched and writhed. Smoke belched up into the foundry stack from carved mouths above the machine. Lightning flashed from tesla coils that stuck out from the sides like horns on a demon’s head.
To one side of the monstrosity, a huge figure shoveled relentlessly from an enormous pile of coal. Bare-chested, the sweat glinted off him in the lightning show of the hellish instrument. As I drew closer, the man turned slightly, as he shoveled the coal into the gaping hole in the instrument’s furnace. I saw that where I thought to see rough and ragged determination, I only saw idiocy in a thin face stretched to accommodate the ridiculous pinhead upon which it sat.
I quickly turned my eyes away from the muscled pinhead and walked toward the hidden side of the steam organ.
The music rose to a crescendo to run with my mounting terror. I wanted so badly to turn and run from the place, but I could not. I had to see the thing that had been orchestrating the soundtrack to my writing these many days. I also feared that if that music stopped, then the awful world in which I found myself would turn on me in my delinquency.
The being that played the organ, reaching, pulling, and beating a great keyboard made of bleached bone, was the opposite of the one that shoveled coal into its belly. This man was also drenched in sweat, but wore a strange tailed coat, that would not have looked out of place on some motley carnival harlequin.
Although the body was tiny, as were the reaching and pumping legs and arms, as stunted as any dwarf’s, the head rose up three times too big for the body of a much taller man.
Then as the huge-headed creature played, he turned that awful head and fixed me with a leering smile. Still he jumped and pulled, but his giant lips fell back to reveal great rows of perfect ivory teeth, as big as piano keys.
The music screamed, and died. My hands fell exhausted at my sides.
“Do you like my music?” this awful homunculus asked in a high and piping voice.
I screamed.
The pinhead and the homunculus screamed. I screamed again, unable to stop. The creatures danced in hilarity and continued to send up their cries with mine.
Somehow I found my feet, and ran out through the darkened hallways and into the dark of night. I drove a ways out of town before I found the calm to return to my apartment. I locked and bolted my doors, pulled the shades, and collapsed into my bed.
The next day, I awoke and quickly turned off my cell phone. I knew I would have to go somewhere where there would be other people, but no danger of music or radios to distract my fragile nerves.
I have been writing evil, I realized. I have been matching my prose with the unholy screams of that awful machine. Who was Smiley? Why did he want such a thing? I had to know more, to understand. I knew I would not return to that dismal foundry down beside the river.
I went to the library, where once I had languished many a free hour. I had always been an avid reader, of course, but I remembered another reason for haunting the stacks whenever I could. Heather Prentiss, the assistant librarian was enough reason to pretend to read a thousand books. Thinking back on my crush on the young woman, seemed like remembering something that happened ten years before, rather than just over a month.
I trembled when I saw her behind the circulation desk. I waited in the shadows of the foyer until an old man distracted her, and I slipped past to the room where the computers were available for public use.
I got on the internet and looked up any connections I could make between the Writing Program and Smiley. Nothing. Yahoo News was full of the terrible news of mass senseless riots that had shaken the nation. Over fifty people had apparently gone mad with terror during a little league baseball game the night before. Some of them claimed they had seen the pitcher change shape at the mound.
Madness, I thought, and then under some strange impulse, I googled myself.
That’s when I learned about the fan sites, the body of work that was readily available for free and public consumption. Curtis Payne was an underground sensation on the internet. Some of my well-wishers and devoted fans, using such names as soulrot69, pledged eternal service to me in hell. I pushed away from the computer than, my heart beating wildly.
“I’ll never write another fucking word!” I said aloud. An older woman at the periodical rack turned and gave me such a look of disgust and shock, I nearly apologized to her. Instead I walked quickly toward the front of the library.
“Curtis!” Heather Prentiss shouted at me as I appeared out of the computer room.
I stopped in my tracks. The young woman smiled and adjusted her glasses in the way I had seen her do when a handsome young reader had asked for her help in finding something.
“Curtis, I read that story that you left for me…”
“What?”
“The story, ‘Ninja Blade’, it was… it was…”
“I didn’t leave you a story, Heather,” I said.
“Ha-ha, joker,” she said, and reached out and play-slapped my shoulder, my shoulder. She pulled a closed manila envelope from under the desk and held it out as proof.
“It was amazing. I was wondering what you were doing later, I would love to go somewhere quiet and talk about your work together… alone.”
“My God, you read it?” I asked her, and grabbed the story from her hand.
“Yeah!” she said, wide-eyed. Did I detect madness there? I thought I did.
“I’m sorry, Heather, I have to go,” I blurted and ran from the library.
I locked myself into my apartment again and read the story that I had gotten from Heather. I did not remember ever writing this “Ninja Blade”.
After I had finished I knew that I had written it, and I think I understood why. I was writing to draw shadows across men’s souls, so that these old ones could rise up. I ran and got out my mother’s books again, and skimmed through them.
I had been a big Lovecraft fan since I discovered him my fourteenth year. On one level I supposed this Ninja Blade seemed a cheap pastiche on a very old idea, but then I realized that everyone would think some mutant monster waited to consume the world. Maybe the aliens were just monstrous thought memes, maybe it was us that would get deformed by the very evil of those thoughts, enslaved and twisted by them.
I tore up the awful story into tiny strips. I gave myself my best hollow-eyed stare in the mirror.
“I’ll never write another fucking word!” I said. I began chanted it like a mantra all through the afternoon.
I started to feel a bit more together. By evening, however, I couldn’t keep a real thought in my head. I tried to think of where to run to or who to try to convince to help me.
When my upstairs neighbor knocked on the door, I jumped right off my sofa.
“Listen, some jack-ass keeps calling my cell phone and asking for you. Take it and shut that bastard up, will you?” the man grumbled. He shoved the phone into my hand. With great reluctance, I lifted the phone and put it to my ear.
A girl shrieked in my ear. I could hear her pleading for mercy and then she screamed again. I lifted the phone away from my ear and put it back.
“Hey, Curtis!” Mr. Smiley said into my ear. “I hear you are taking some rest and relaxation time. Normally, I’d understand, but we’ve got a deadline coming up, and I have some pretty important clients that want results, if you know what I mean.”
“I’ll never write another fucking word!” I said through clenched teeth.
“That’s really tragic. I told Heather Prentiss here, our good and sexy lady librarian, that I was sure you would be willing to crank out some stellar prose in order to keep her out of pain and safe. I hate being wrong,” he said.
“But, I think she’s going to hate it worse than me, just between you and me,” Mr. Smiley said. From Smiley’s end, Heather let out a pain-inspired scream once more.
“All right, all right, stop!” I panted.
“Then you best get your young derriere back to your seat here at the old foundry. You’ve got lots of fans waiting for your next great work,” he said.
***
And so I sit, typing away. They’ve chained and gagged Heather to a chair right in front of me as I write. I guess they think that will motivate me. I suppose they’re right, whoever they are. I thought to warn the world at least, but who’s going to believe me? In any case, I think it is too late for the world. It is definitely too late for you, if you’ve read this far. I’m still not sure how it works. Maybe it has to do with the overtones of my words, or the combinations of the letters. I don’t know.
I tried to warn you, way back in the beginning, but nobody ever heeds that type of warning, do they? I mean, it isn’t in our nature. I suppose we were just the right fit for those awful thought-gods about which my mother had worried herself to an early grave.
I’d like to die. I would.
But, then there’s always the writing. As I write, I see the darkness descending down every day to cover the world. There is a part of me that wants to say, to hell with it, and just bite down and write the ultimate story, maybe open all the gates, and really bring the curtain down with a bang. You know? I laugh as I write this, the idea growing greater every moment.
Forgive me.
Available Now:
Test of a Prince
t. l. barrett
A dark fantasy epic from Twisted Library Press
After Ragnarok, the realm of Jotunheim suffers under a terrible curse. Out of the darkness, a prince wearing the face of a demon gathers a handful of old and troubled heroes: a one-handed fisherman, a drug-addled swordsman, an embittered holy man, and a cross-dressing satyr. In the hope of salvation and with the help of some diminutive Mindans and a young woman, the heroes embark on the darkest of quests. Test of a Prince is the first volume in a dark fantasy epic about a land increasingly filled with those that can no longer be ranked among the file of men.
Available in print and kindle e-book at Amazon.com
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And coming soon,
the finale of the Jotunheim saga:
The Vale of Shade
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. L. Barrett lives in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom with his wife, Sandra and their sons. His earliest scary stories as a boy were really intricate contingency plans should monsters attack his house. He has published many short stories in magazines and anthologies. He loves and writes fantasy, horror and humor. He is currently working on his sixth novel.